The first full day of ‘conference’ opened with the best ’emerging tech’ we were to see all day. It was a late addition to the program and happened because Tim saw him at TED. (so much for the submission process). Jeffery Han shared the touch table interface for the computer. This is actually sexy technology – sensual and very embodied.
We had Artificial Artificial Intelligence with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk – basically it is micro-outsourcing to india (as far as I can tell) and yesturday R0ml in keeping with presentation as performance art said what they were up to at Root was Artificial artificial artificial intelligence.
IBM presented the enterprise mashup Wiki that looked cool. (apparently in the article I linked to Mashosphere is now a word)
Clay had Hobbs and Rousseau argue about Dave Winer to articulate the need to develop a pattern language for moderation. This is to address the Freedom to Annoyingness curve of online community space. This is vital to supporting the encoding bargain we are making with social tools about freedom of speech.
There was Playsh that was like MUD text searching on the web (I think)
Yesturday for keynotes you had two talks that were way to short. The Real Nature of the Attention Economy and George Dyson’s history lesson on the visions of web 2.0 that go back 160 years.
Mary Hodder presented on itags followed by Dana Boyde on Glocalization and what happens we we mash global and local together. It was a great articulation of some anthro and ethnography for the geeks to get what online community is about. (i will post details later)
The best study people do something cool application has to be Reep’s Trampoline Collaboration Platform. From his research of on one of the scilly island’s St Agnes. They have only 80 residents.
Last night they had a mini-maker faire it was really fun. Glowing clothing, roomba cock fights, “new” attari games,
Mary Hodder
FLUIDS…they are just names
This is a post IDs: where do they lead … ? by Bill Anderson that is great.
Bill and I were introduced by Jerry Michalski – (sociate) and have had quite a few great conversations over the past year. He did this post in early December that I just found. I though you would enjoy the humor and point he is making.
I’ve been noticing that I’m getting more and more behind on the online identity conversations, implementations, ruminations, and exploitations (?). But I try to keep track of what pops up on the weblogs of Mary Hodder and Kaliya Hamlin, for starters.
I was looking at the acronym “ID” and that triggered the following set of associations:
IDs = identifiers, could even be names, but seem to be more formal, as in “Show me your ID.”
UIDs = unique ones of these ID thingys. These show up sometimes on software modules.
GUIDs = globally unique ID thingys. I’ve seen these being applied to globally identifying species, and again to software (where it’s sometimes spelled UUID).
and this led me to yet another acronym:
FLUIDs = which I’m defining as familiar, famous, or favorite local, unique, identifier thingys. These, I think, are also known as names.
Identity Workshop Informational Morning – Success!
So we have a great time at the workshop yesterday. Eugene gave a great over view of “the problem” and why pinging a third party identity broker/provider would be a good evolution.
Johannes gave a great overview of the space URL based identifiers (YADIS – currently looking for a new name), WS* (Microsoft) and Liberty Alliance.
Dave presented about OpenID,
John presented about SXIP 2.0,
Drummond on XRI and
Eugene again about Yoke – the I-broker for the masses.
Mary Hodder shared here use of identity for her video community.
Tom from Opinity shared how they are using identity for their reputation network.
Marc Canter shared his use of identity (specifically SXIP) in GoingOn across networks and communities.
Chirs Allen shared some use cases for networks where he needs identity.
I closed out by talking about the new identity commons ‘clear focus.
the developers who attended expressed their interest in being there and we broke for lunch.
All had a good time and much networking happened.
Building an App? come and learn about the identity landscape.
Mary Hodder, Identity Woman Kaliya and Doc Searls are hosting an Internet Identity Workshop informational morning on December 12th at the Canton Won Ton at Folsom and Third in downtown San Francisco. It is before the Syndicate conference workshops that start in the afternoon.
The event starts at 9 goes to 12 with lunch after that. Cost is $20 for lunch.
It will be a very interactive event and you will get to meet all the key identity developers and an overview of options to build identity into systems.
You will need to sign up on the wiki.
i-taging
Mary Hodder, Drummond and myself have been collaborating on using identity in tagging.
Here is Mary’s post for it.
There is a wiki up.
Tagging back and forth.
Passel: identity. remixed.
DizzyD presented on Passel and The Identity Gang is in the HOUSE! Johanes, Doc, Phil, Mary and Mary – wow three identity women.
He also didn’t really approach it right he didn’t get all the different systems and how they worked and we were all in the audience correcting him. It really highlighted the need for the workshop we are hosting in October.
Here is the summary:
How do I as user my identity on the web?
The ‘story that started it all’
Wife’s machine got Trojan. I had to change all passwords everywhere.
What is Identity?!
Identity is just another class of information we manage.
It’s a second-order problem. When I get on the net I get on it to do Identity Management other tasks.
What is Identity [Italicized] ?
Depends on the setting
Bottom line two fundamental types
third party vouch for and self asserted
His summary of the other stuff..
What are the options:
Passport
All others are not inherently evil.
everyone is throwing protocols against the wall and seeing which ones stick.
who do you trust to host you identity?
SAML
SAML/Liberty
trust relatinoship between two entities on your behalf
“asserting” used a lot in this world….and I will use it a lot
Standards are well documented and widely deployed. Lots of infrastructure required for trust relationships. Conditionals and trust relationships not viable from an open source stand point. Took a lot of time for a second order problem.
SXIP
Identity is locked into who the identity provider. You can change home sites. not locked in. Run on own machine. Powerful for users with centralized for user to move.
LID
Send information back and forth and urls based.
OpenID
No dynamic scripting needed. You have your identity URL tell via meta tag where identity server is. enter URL – blog URL. LiveJournal do you allow it to authenticate?
Can’t i-names do this?
He asserted wrongly that there was not reputation (global services launch will embed reputation in the messaging/contact system.
For Internet-scale Identity needs
- Aggregate IDentity
- Decentralized and open
- Divers programming Language/environments
- Interoperable implementations
- Bootstrap off existing trust models
PASSEL
Gives you more control over data
Aggregates your identity via user-centric three-piece architechure
implemntations already started Perl, PHP, Java and C#
Pluggable trust models.
Generalized model for proving any DNS-based identifier
Trust Model
- how you prove the signer
- person x
- Moving identity information proving that a
- protocol how move around
- plug in how you trust information
PIECES:
Agent (principle’s computer)
- aggregates into portfolio
- public private key and fingerprint
- natively if not
- Zip file on key – use on different locations
Signer (site that makes assertions)
- signer issues token with for example 4 hour life span
- agent must retrieve new token from dizzyd.com
Target (relying party)
- how does the
- retrieval of public key.
Creating Spaces for Innovation and Conversation
I have just gotten back into the swing of things – reading all the blogs I should be etc. I am starting off where I put things down about two months ago (I have 4000+ posts to scan/read in my identity streams folder).
Reading this post by Mary I remember the citizens jouranlism day that was less then ideal. The whole event got me thinking about the art and skill involved in creating good containers for people to gather in. The day was a disaster on a bunch of levels.
- First of all there was no clear map to get to the location. After we arrived Mary and I made a sign out of a paper bag to make sure others coming after us would actually know where to turn in.
- It was summer in SF at the Precido – for those of you who don’t know that means it will likely be very cold, windy and foggy. People were not warmed of this and so basically everyone was freezing.
- This was a meeting about internet citizen journalism – I had assumed we would be meeting in a building with wifi – not the case.
- When one calls an event and it has a start time – it is good for the host to actually show up prior to that time to welcome folks. Our host that day arrived an hour late and got to saying hello to everyone at 1.5 hours after the stated start time.
- It is good to feed people at events – so there was some effort made in this direction – hotdogs and hambergers. No one was really organized to actually cook the food. Two of the women who were just there to participate ended up taking the lead in preparing food. They had not volunteered for this role before hand but no one was doing it so they stepped in and cooked.
- After introductions concluded we all moved down to the internet archive – this was a packed room and 30+ people were trying to have one conversation. We were all looking to the organizers for some structure to the conversation – none was really provided.
- I am told that after I left the conversation did get better.
I am not writing this to be purely critical but to highlight some real world examples of the challenges that aries when organizing in person event. Consciousness about how to bring people together could be further cultivated in this community. 40 amazing people were asked to and willingly volunteered 6 hours of their time on a SUNDAY to join this discussion. More attention and for thought could have been given to the container created.
This metaphor of the container is one that comes from my work in spiritual activism. How are you going to honor peoples time and the gifts they are bringing to what ever purpose you have. This container involves the whole of the event:
- the initial intention
- who is included in manifesting the intention
- who is invited
- choice of process and facilitation
- proposed goals outcomes
- the physical aspects of the event –
- Location – inside/outside – bigroom/lots of small rooms – bathrooms or not
- nourishment needs (food and drink)
The creation of a strong community container is one of the keys to success for online worlds too. Claire from SUN has this post referencing Caterina Fake about how they (FLICKR) focused (and continue to focus) very strongly on the container of community. This positive field of feedback has drawn energy towards them.
People are more likely to work well together well not only when they have a common interest or shared set of goals – but also when there is a personal connection. I try to work well with most people, but I’m much more motivated to to cut people slack when I know a little bit about who they are, when I can tease them about their taste in a band called FloggingMolly, when I know that they like to delve into 1337 5p34k on occasion, or if I know that her talented brother went to RISD and is friends with the infamous creator of of Andre The Giant Has A Posse.
Caterina Fake of Flickr fame recently blogged about building a flickricious sense of community (gotta love that word) – and the importance of personal connections caught my eye. One relevant quote from Caterina – the part about personal – and authentic – communication is at the end of the paragraph:
“In the beginning, the creators of the community space have to create the tone and attitude of the place, set the parameters of what is and what is not allowed, and participate heavily, engaging directly with other people, mercilessly kicking/banning trolls, creating a real sense of there being a there there. Friendster, and the banning of “Fakesters” is often used as an example of a misunderstanding of online community — but I think this misunderstanding went back further, to the beginning. I was an early member of Friendster and, the first message I got was from the founder. “How do you like the service?” he asked, and not — and this is really the crux of it — “Pynchon! Man, how can you read that stuff! DeLillo is 10X better.” or “ZEPPELIN ROX! Zoso is my favorite album!!!” I’d filled out a profile. See what I mean?”
What’s the conclusion? Growing the OpenSolaris community is going to involve building lots of these personal connections. Personal and authentic, not stiff and corporate. Cool.
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